Research Unplugged Episode 2 – At the margins: Research and action on homelessness

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• Interviewers: Andrew Welsh, Tracy Woodford
• Guest: Dr. Erin Dej
• Length of Interview: 30:30
• Listen to Episode

00:00:00 [Intro music]

00:00:16 Andrew Welsh

Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Welsh, and welcome to the second episode of the Faculty of Human and social Sciences podcast, Research Unplugged, Unplugged, Stay Connected. I'm joined by my co-host, Tracy Woodford, and our guest for today's episode is criminology faculty member Dr. Erin Dej, not “Deige” (pronounced phonetically), Dr. Erin Dej. Welcome.

00:00:35 Erin Dej

Thank you. I'm truly thrilled to be here.

00:00:37 Andrew Welsh

Well, we're really happy you could join us. We really appreciate your time. We're getting close to Christmas.

00:00:42 Andrew Welsh

Apparently, the university closes, I think the last day is December the 23rd. I will be disappearing next Friday the 19th. I'll still be checking email, don't worry.

00:00:51 Erin Dej

I never disappear. I'm constantly going one way or another.

00:00:54 Andrew Welsh

Well, you'll have to disappear because the building will actually be locked down and I think they turn like the heat really down low. You won't want to be here. so, we are very happy to have you here. So, for everyone, not just me, just joining us for a second episode, what we want to do with our FHSS podcast is bring research to students and kind of the general public. so, this is kind of research unpacked or unplugged for the average person. so, we know we've got a set of questions for you, Dr. Dej, about your research program. We'll start off a little bit general so, the audience can get to know you a little bit, you know, what drew you to criminology?

00:01:32 Erin Dej

What a great question that I haven't thought about in a while. so, I'm excited to get to talk about this. I did grade 11 law class in high school and fell in love with it. I really enjoyed the legal aspect of it, but I knew I never wanted to be a lawyer. And so, I did my undergrad in criminology with a specialization in law. And so, most of my friends and colleagues in that undergrad, again, wanted to be lawyers and I needed to find my own path. And so, because I was leaning more heavily to law, I thought maybe criminology wasn't for me because I ended up really liking my constitutional law classes and thinking about the charter and the division of power between the federal and the provincial levels of government. so, quite different. so, I thought, okay, you know what, maybe I don't want to do crim (criminology) maybe I want to do law. so, I did my master's in legal studies. And lo and behold, as I kept thinking about my thesis work for my master's, it just kept going back to crim, it kept going back to how we are using the criminal justice system in ways that are actually inherently unjust. And so, it turns out I couldn't get away from crim even if I wanted to. And so, I ended up doing my PhD in criminology but really focused on critical criminology. And that's the space where I feel really comfortable in, which is thinking about the criminal justice system or injustice system as a use of power and thinking about who is criminalized and who isn't criminalized in this system that we, use that idea of, the balance of justice and we use this idea of fairness. And what I keep seeing in all my studies and now in my research is how actually inherently unfair the system is in a lot of way. And so, that's what's kept me intrigued after all these years.

00:03:20 Andrew Welsh

I'm probably going to regret, Tracy asking you this question because you've probably told me, what did you major in university?

00:03:26 Tracy Woodford

Well, I did my undergrad in psychology and a master's in public health.

00:03:30 Andrew Welsh

Okay. I was just curious. I haven't asked you that before, though.

00:03:34 Tracy Woodford

Well, I had a little dabble in criminology in my undergrad.

00:03:38 Andrew Welsh

Well, that's okay. I did psychology as well. Don't feel bad.

00:03:40 Tracy Woodford

So, it's very fascinating. It's A fascinating subject.

00:03:44 Andrew Welsh

Yeah, it's Netflix is our best recruiters [laughter]

00:03:47 Erin Dej

This is it. And so, I don't, maybe this will make me unpopular to the students. But anyways, I don't watch true crime documentaries or podcasts like that. whole area of criminal justice is not for me. I'm too anxious and high-strung of a person to get into that. so, that's not where I ended up falling in love with criminology. so, I've taken a bit of a different path than I would say yes, most of the students I encounter and kind of the people I work with. But there's like a small pocket of people doing the kind of things that I do.

00:04:20 Andrew Welsh

It's always kind of cool to hear what drew people here, and which kind of leads to the next question is, when did you know you wanted to be a university professor?

00:04:27 Erin Dej

I didn't know for probably until I got this job seven years ago. I didn't think I could do it. I didn't think I was smart enough. I didn't think I was capable enough. And there were some people in my life who really pushed me. so, in my undergrad, I did a field placement with a, essentially a think tank, a government kind of arm's length government think tank. And it was two people there who said, “Are you going to law school or grad school?” Not, “What are you going to do? Which one,” they said, “Which one are you going to do?” And I was like, “Oh, I guess I better do one of those,” and I knew I didn't want to do law school. And then it was in my master's where my master's supervisor really encouraged me to do the PhD. And so, I give so, much credit to those folks to having champions in my corner when I wasn't my own champion.

00:05:18 Erin Dej

And I knew I loved teaching, and I knew I loved doing research, but the job market to become a professor is a pretty tough one. It has only gotten tougher. And so, I often wouldn't dare to hope that I would get to be a professor. And so, I count my blessings every day. For all the challenges that come with this job, I have never lost sight of how grateful I am that I get to be a professor. I love, I love a captive audience [laughter] I love getting to talk to my class and I learn so much from my students. Hopefully they learn something from me too, but it's definitely a two-way street. so, yeah, I never take this job for granted.

00:06:01 Andrew Welsh

It is a great job. I feel the same. I like a captive audience and students keep me young. so, you definitely are learning from them as well. so, we're going to move on into your research program. so, just to kind of start us off generally, tell us a little bit about your research program.

00:06:16 Erin Dej

so, over the last 15 years, I focused my research on homelessness. Originally, when I started my PhD, it was more on the intersection of mental health and homelessness, but not so, much from a psych perspective. so, I would say from like a sociological perspective. so, understanding how mental illness diagnoses are used and made sense of in the homeless population. But then since that time, I've done all sorts of various things on homelessness. so, looking at the social exclusion of people who are homeless, you only have to look outside to see how people who are homeless are treated differently than housed people and what that does to somebody to lose their dignity and lose their sense of humanity in all sorts of little micro ways over the course of a day, which adds up to weeks, to months, to years. In my postdoc, I was able to do work on homelessness prevention. so, trying to think about how do we support people while they're still housed to make sure they don't have to go through the trauma and the awfulness of homelessness? If we can stop it before it starts, like how can we do that? And then over the last six years, I've been doing a lot of work with Dr. Carrie Sanders, who's another faculty member in our department, and others at the University of Guelph and York University on perceptions of homelessness in mid-sized cities specifically. so, when I got this job, I moved from a big city to a mid-sized city. And I saw that mid-sized cities were really, especially post-COVID, were really struggling with the relatively new and increased visibility of homelessness, really struggling to make sense of like, “Why are we seeing homelessness in our city?” Homelessness quote unquote “Belongs in Toronto, in Vancouver, not here where I've bought a house” and things like that. so, really wanting to interrogate that and understand that more and help mid-size cities come to terms with the new reality that there is homelessness, visible homeless, there's always homelessness in those cities, but visible homelessness in those cities. And what can we do to meaningfully address homelessness? Because right now many of these mid-size cities who are struggling to know how to respond are doing the knee-jerk reaction, which is usually punitive, which is usually calling police. But we know that that's actually not going to solve the problem. It's just going to actually make it worse.

00:08:45 Andrew Welsh

Okay, yeah, it's definitely a mid-size city problem, which is a post-COVID phenomenon. You see it in, well, here in Brantford, Kitchener, Cambridge, Barrie, Oshawa, it's not just big cities. Hamilton, I think, has a pretty big problem with it. It's all over the news. so, I mean, you kind of touched on this, but I'll ask anyways, what drew you to this area? How did you get involved in studying homelessness?

00:09:08 Erin Dej

Yeah, what a great question. It didn't happen... Naturally, I'm very upfront when I talk about this and when I teach my homelessness course that I don't have lived experience of homelessness. And so, I'm very intentional about including lived experts in all of my research because they're the, again, they teach me so, much. They're the ones who really know and I don't have that firsthand experience. so, and the other reason I make sure I say that up front is because you don't only have to have lived experience to care about this. It hasn't touched my life, and I still am incredibly devoted to using my time, talent, energy to trying to make a dent in this homelessness crisis. And so, you don't have to have personal experience to care about it or any social issue. But so, I started thinking about homelessness and working in this area because at the beginning of my PhD, I was originally going to work in the court system and it's incredibly difficult to gain access as we know in Canada to the courts, but in particular the correction system. so, I started volunteering at the local emergency shelter and it truly changed my life, in ways I had no idea at the time, but has redirected my life in almost every way. And primarily it was because I started chatting with unhoused people and I was like, oh, they really are just like me. Like, I think I had a misperception because I hadn't spent time with unhoused people before that of like, there must be something like inherently different and there really, really isn't. Very different, in many cases, very different opportunities and inequities compared to myself and their life trajectory. But we would chat about hockey, and we would chat about the movies coming out and things like that. And so, it really showed me how if different things had happened in my life, I would have been in the same place. And so, again, the inherent injustice of anybody in this country being homeless has really fueled me these last 15 years.

00:11:22 Andrew Welsh

One of the, oh, sorry, go ahead.

00:11:24 Tracy Woodford

I was just going to say that I think it's really great that you're taking it from a position of advocacy for people that don't have voices. And so, much of what we hear about homelessness is about this misperception that people want to be on the street, they choose that life. And that's clearly not the case. And so, I think it's great that you're advocating for people that that just can't, that don't have that voice.

00:11:50 Erin Dej

Yeah, there's so, much I want to say on that. But yeah, one of the things I try to do in my research and in my advocacy is amplify the voices, give them space because they have their voices already. And so, I try to use this position of power, being a university professor is a position of power. The funding I get is powerful. And so, I do everything I can to direct those funds, to direct these opportunities to lived experts so, they can speak for themselves. And then I'd love, I'd be happy to talk about this idea that people choose to be homeless. But you want this to be not a two-hour long podcast. so, I will restrain myself. Have me on again another week. [laughter]

00:12:30 Andrew Welsh

Absolutely. Actually, your last kind of comments kind of lead into the next question. We wanted to take a little bit of a deeper dive into your work on homelessness, and my understanding is you've been involved in the production of a documentary, and I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that.

00:12:44 Erin Dej

I would love to. It is my baby, so, I'm my and my research team's baby, so, I'm so, glad to get to talk about it. The documentary is called “Bridging Divides: Voices and Visions on Homelessness in Midsize Cities.” It came out of five years of research we did on these perceptions and misperceptions of homelessness in three mid-sized cities in southern Ontario. We interviewed people who are experiencing homelessness, service providers, community members, which includes, you know, business owners, community associations, concerned community groups, things like that, and law enforcement, so, that included bylaw, police, and actually some first responders, so, some fire (fighters) as well. And we wanted to make the documentary because we wanted people from these different perspectives of homelessness to be in conversation with one another, but in a safe way. It is not safe, I would argue, for somebody who's experienced homelessness to necessarily be in conversation with a member of law enforcement. And so, we use what we call broker dialogue methodology, which you should have Carrie (Sanders) on this podcast to talk about broker dialogue. It would be a great episode. so, kudos go to Carrie Sanders, who really made sure this documentary happened when I would have given up quite a few times. So, her perseverance is what made this happen [light laughter].

But so, it was through us that we brokered the conversation. So, the folks talked to us and then we showed them each other's, with their permission, we showed them each other's videos and then they spoke back to those videos. And so, the final product, the final documentary is that conversation. And what you end up seeing is that there is more alignment than we might think. And so, we talked to a business owner who says, I don't hate unhoused people. I understand she actually has an incredible amount of compassion for people who are homeless, but she's also, trying to run a coffee shop in particular. And people won't walk into her coffee shop if they have to step over an unhoused person. So, she's trying to balance that. And then the lived expert we have is an incredible human being named Simon. And he talks about things he's done and how rough he was when he was in the depths of homelessness and how he's a little bit out of it now. And so, he sees that like that is hard. And so, there really is more commonality than we think between a lot of these groups.

00:15:06 Tracy Woodford

Absolutely. And I've seen the documentary three times, I think.

00:15:09 Erin Dej

Tracy is one of our champions and I appreciate it so, much.

00:15:12 Tracy Woodford

And it's so, powerful. And Simon in particular, I think I can speak to others that have seen it, you walk away going, “Wow, that could be me. That could very easily be me.” And it's such a powerful message that you're sending and the whole brokered dialogue, I think you just got so, much more out of hearing people's, you know, lived experience than you would if they were just sat beside each other and trying to work something out. You know, I don't think you would ever get anywhere with the traditional way of dialogue. It's, I can't speak any much higher than I can. It's just, it's a great, it's a great documentary and everyone should see it. I should be, you know, mandated that all of Canada has to watch this.

00:16:00 Erin Dej

I love you, Tracy. [laughter]

00:16:01 Andrew Welsh

Tracy loves that. I mean, Erin loves that [laughter]

00:16:02 Erin Dej

I do, I do.

00:16:05 Andrew Welsh

What is the name of the documentary, the actual full title?

00:16:08 Erin Dej

Yeah, Bridging Divides, Voices and Visions on Homelessness in Mid-sized Cities. Just rolls off the tongue.

00:16:15 Andrew Welsh

It's a very good academic document.

00:16:16 Erin Dej

That's right. There's the before the colon and the after the colon, that's for sure.

00:16:20 Andrew Welsh

Yeah, and it can't be the sensationalized like the Netflix. so, that actually works much better. Was the plan always to do a documentary?

00:16:26 Erin Dej

Absolutely. so, we got the funding to do this literally 2 weeks into COVID. so, I was going on one of those walks, those walks we all did during COVID. And yeah, Carrie called me and said, “We got the funding.” And we went, “Uh-oh, how are we supposed to do anything that we planned now with lockdowns and things like that?” So, the first few years of that project were rough, I will admit, but we managed to make it work. And by the time we were ready to film the documentary, COVID restrictions had been lifted. so, we were able to do it. So, absolutely, it was always part of the plan. A wonderful scholar in the homelessness sector named Alex Abramovich had done a brokered dialogue on youth homelessness and mental health. And so, I'd seen that at a conference, and he came on board on the research project to help us work through the methodology. And so, it was very important to us from the get-go to do something that had reached beyond the walls of academia, that we really wanted to do something that was for community. And so, again, thanks to Carrie's perseverance, we made it happen despite a series of challenges that come with any research project, let alone trying to make a documentary.

00:17:37 Andrew Welsh

I'm going to switch up the order of our planned questions because it's not a rigid plan. Just because your last comments lead better into this is, why do you think it is so, important? And Tracy said it; everybody should see this documentary. so, why is it so, important to get this kind of research out outside of academic journals and in front of just regular people?

00:17:55 Erin Dej

Because that's the work I do. If you're going to do work like I do with a group who, as Tracy already mentioned, is shut out of so many spaces and isn't always able to get their voices heard, I have an obligation and I hold that responsibility really true to my heart to make sure that, again, in the position that I have, that I can make their voices heard in whatever way I can. I want my research to have impact. I think that word impact gets thrown around in all sorts of ways that I don't know I'm always a fan of lately. But what it means to me is that if I can do a little part, if I'm a, I think about it as a link in a chain, if I can be a link in a chain in moving the conversation about homelessness forward, then I think this is time well spent.

I certainly have days lying awake at night where it feels hopeless, where I feel, in many ways, we have gone backwards in the last, I would say, a few years on homelessness. But I also, see people doing incredible things and working so, hard, and I want to make, I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of that movement forward. And so, I don't let myself wallow in hopelessness for very long. And I have actually a bunch of lived experts who wouldn't let me wallow even if I wanted to. They hold me accountable in really great ways. And so, this documentary is another way of reaching people. so, I fully recognize that people outside of academia are probably not going to read an academic article. I think there's a role for academic articles. I think peer review is really important. But it's just one method. And so, something I've learned is about, knowledge mobilization is reaching different audiences in different ways so, that you can be of interest to them. And so, a documentary is one way to do that.

00:19:42 Andrew Welsh

Yeah, it's just academic papers are like a tool on a toolbox. You don't have one tool on your toolbox. You have a whole bunch. So, how are you getting the documentary out to people?

00:19:51 Erin Dej

So, it's been a year since we launched it. I think what's really important for us is that it is free on YouTube. so, if you Google “Bridging Divides…”, you are going to see it on YouTube. And you know, I've seen a lot of really cool documentaries, but because, you know, I imagine it costs a lot of money to make, they're paywalled and a pretty high rate to see those documentaries. This, we received funding from the federal government. This is for Canadians, so, it's free on YouTube. And then we've been able to do a bunch of community screenings over the last year. 

So, when it first launched, we did very large screenings in the three cities where we had done the research. And we made sure that we had a panel afterwards so, that the conversation can keep going. So, one of the things that's important to us is that the brokered dialogue, having these conversations between people who might not necessarily on the surface agree with each other, that it doesn't end at the documentary. It actually starts with the documentary. So, we had these panels as part of those community screenings on the YouTube link, we actually have a list of questions like a book club. At the end of some 00books, there's like book club questions. We have that kind of thing so, that people can do their own screenings. And so, actually, over the last month and this past November, over the course of one week, we had seven screenings in just a week of the documentary in various locations around Brantford and Brant County, in Guelph, in Waterloo. So, it's really reaching. I was able to show the documentary to the federal government department who oversees the homelessness file. And so, that was a really exciting opportunity. We've been able to share it in Santiago, Chile, in Victoria, BC. Yeah, so, we're on a bit of a roadshow to show it. Again, any eyeballs that are willing to look at it, we're there for it.

00:21:48 Tracy Woodford

That's great.

00:21:50 Andrew Welsh

I like that. You should have like tour t-shirts [laughter]

00:21:53 Erin Dej

That is so, funny because Carrie loves making shirts for this project. We have had two rounds of shirts made. So, you give her that idea and she's going to run with it.

00:22:02 Andrew Welsh

What were the three cities actually, by the way?

00:22:04 Erin Dej

Brantford, where we work, Cambridge, where some of us live, including myself, and Guelph, where other of us live and work and play.

00:22:14 Andrew Welsh

Okay, yeah, they're all mid-sized cities too. One of the things that came up when we were doing, we do, before each episode, we meet with who our subjects are, we go over, not subjects, interviewees, that was terrible when you're phrasing it [laughter]. We just kind of go over what some of the questions are and one of the terms that came up was this invisibility track. What is this invisibility track?

00:22:36 Erin Dej

Yeah, so, it's the invisibility trap. And yes, it is one of the main findings from our research project was that we noticed that the very efforts that many of these mid-size cities were doing to try to hide homelessness, not solve homelessness, all they're trying to do is hide it, are actually making homelessness more visible. So, an example of that is one of the main approaches to dealing with encampments or just people who are you know, sitting on benches in parks is to move them along. “You can't stay here. You got to get out of here.” But what that ends up doing is just moving them. Honestly, it's usually just a block or two over. People don't usually move very far. And so, you're not, you're actually just making it more visible to more neighbours than if you would just let somebody stay there.

Another example is using law enforcement for non-criminal activity. And so, you'll see police cruisers and you'll see people in uniform coming to address somebody who's homeless, but they're not actually, they weren't engaging in criminal activity, but you walk by and you don't know, you're going to think, you're going to make that connection that, “Oh, people who are homeless are inherently criminal,” and they're not. A lot of the work we've been doing is about people who will resist and push back for any kind of homelessness or housing programs to be in their neighborhood. So, they don't want a supportive housing building in their neighborhood or shelter or drop-in space. When we don't have those services and housing in places for unhoused people to be, they have to be somewhere. They are human bodies that exist in the world. And so, they're going to be on the sidewalk. They're going to be in the parks because they literally have nowhere else to go. And so, if we provided those kinds of spaces and resources, it would address the problems overall. But by restricting them and fighting them all the way, you're actually making homelessness more visible than if you had been solution-oriented in providing a solution.

So, those are three of the five. But so, yeah, we have 5 paradoxes that we've uncovered where it's actually having the opposite effect that these mid-size cities think it's having, and so, we really need to think about more meaningful, evidence-informed, human rights-based solutions to addressing this crisis.

00:24:56 Andrew Welsh

It just reminds me of when they had, I'd always heard stories prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver that they were, I think they passed like an anti-panhandling bylaw that don't,

don't quote me on this, but my understanding of it was, is that there was a fine attached to it, but if you couldn't pay the fine, you could be jailed, which would give law enforcement a way to kind of sweep, I think one of the terms they used was homelessness people.

00:25:23 Erin Dej

Absolutely! So, we have that, we have that law in Ontario and in BC. It was actually recently; the Ontario law was recently half struck down just last year. So, anyways, there's movement in that direction. But one of the things we kept coming across in this work on misperceptions of homelessness that I've literally heard across the country is that people are being bused into their community, that unhoused people can't possibly be from these cities. They're being bused from other cities into these cities. And that is largely untrue. Most people who are homeless in the city have lived in those cities for at least five years. About 1/3 have lived there their whole lives. So, it's certainly not true.

But that myth about people being bused in is for the most part untrue. I think there's a couple of instances where that happens and that kind of fuels that narrative. But one of the examples where it is true is the Vancouver Olympics. They absolutely bused people out of Vancouver and into other locations. And it's not just Vancouver, any Olympic city, which I think is so, silly. All these cities have homelessness. Why are we trying to pretend that none of them do? So, yeah, the Vancouver Olympics is an example where absolutely that busing myth is true.

00:26:33 Andrew Welsh

It's definitely a paradox, that's for sure. So, what are the next steps for your research? What do you want to do next?

00:26:39 Erin Dej

so, we're so, excited. We received a grant earlier this year to turn the documentary into high school curriculum, so, we're working through that now. We are shortening them into small digestible clips for high school students and then building activities and learning objectives around those clips. And so, we just had our first piloting of that, some of that curriculum in October, and we're going to do it again in May, and then we're going to send it out into the world. And we're working with incredible curriculum specialists who are helping us design it.

So, we really want young people to break some of these myths and to have this a bit of a sense of understanding of what it means to experience homelessness. And again, as Tracy pointed out, Simon in the documentary is an incredibly compelling voice. He's again, he's a wonderful person. And I think he's going to change a lot of people's minds on what homelessness looks like and who can be homeless.

00:27:42 Andrew Welsh

That's fantastic. It's I think that's a great idea. I just everything about the knowledge mobilization here in your research is fascinating. It's, really, I'm impressed.

00:27:51 Erin Dej

It is by far the most out-of-the-box work I've ever done, and it's wonderful. I'm so, glad to get to do it.

00:27:58 Andrew Welsh

Well, you mentioned before that impact gets thrown around a lot, and I feel like the word innovative gets thrown around a lot, but this to me feels genuinely innovative.

00:28:07 Erin Dej

Oh, thank you.

00:28:07 Tracy Woodford

That's absolutely, yeah. And I'm glad you didn't go into constitutional law. We're all very, you know, fortunate that you went this path.

00:28:19 Erin Dej

Oh, thank you. Yeah, I don't think I would have handled it very well [laughter]

00:28:23 Andrew Welsh

What we decided for kind of a trademark for our podcast is at the end of each episode, I do a dad joke of the day, which I mentioned in our office group chat. And I mentioned that in the first episode. So, do you have a joke you like to tell your students or a dad joke of the day or just a joke you find particularly funny?

00:28:40 Erin Dej

Yeah, I've got a mom joke. I'm a mom. So, I've got a mom joke. And the joke is “A guy walked into a bar. Ow, that must have hurt! Thank you!  I'm here all week” [laughter]

00:28:53 Andrew Welsh

I'll be honest, my laugh was a little bit forced, but it's true.

00:28:56 Erin Dej

Ouch! Mom’s can be funny too.

00:28:58 Tracy Woodford

Finally, mom jokes!

00:29:00 Andrew Welsh

Moms can be funny too.

00:29:01 Tracy Woodford

We can!

00:29:01 Andrew Welsh

It's not very good to exclude moms from dad jokes of the day. But thank you so, much for joining us, especially this is a busy time of year for everybody and we really appreciate it. It was fantastic.

00:29:13 Erin Dej

I always to have a chance to talk to you two is always a treat, so, thank you for having me.

00:29:18 Andrew Welsh

Thanks. I don't know, it's a treat to talk to Tracy. I don't know about me [laughter]. But to our audience, we'll be back again in the new year with a third episode that we'll be working on and planning. Thank you for joining us. And thank you again, Erin!

00:29:31 Erin Dej

Thank you.

00:29:32 [Outro music]

00:29:40 Andrew Welsh

Thank you so, much for listening to the Research Unplugged podcast. This episode was made possible by the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University and produced by myself, Andrew Welsh, and Tracy Woodford. Original music provided by Kevin Byrne, Megan Shubrook, and Tracy Woodford. You can find out more about today’s guest and their research in the show notes for this episode.

Until next time, remember to unplug and stay connected.